I personally don’t use Windows, I have to use it at work, but for private things, photo related things etc, I don’t, I have my Debian Sid machine and I am happy with it.

I am using F-Spot to manage my photos. But Lately I was searching something similar to F-Spot for Windows for my sister and my father in law. This is frustrating as there is no application which supports keywording or tagging, searching for tags and keywords, displaying all photos recursively in a directory sorted by date taken (EXIF date). Picasa does not. XnView does — almost. At least XnView supports displaying all photos recursively in a directory and all subdirectories and sorting by EXIF date. But it does not support any keywording, tagging or searching.

The frustration brought me to try out Windows Live Photo Gallery (for Windows XP). Well, it is Windows Live. Fancy user interface distracting the user, the UI is not as responsive as I would wish it to be and so on. But at least it supports all the criteria I was searching for. Without having to buy any other expensive Software. So I recommended it. The tags are written into the EXIF data, in the “Subject” and the XMP Keyword EXIF tags. You can change the date taken of your photos and this date is written into the EXIF tags, too. So there does not seem to be any proprietary Microsoft stuff in there.

Trying it out I recognized that it supports automatic face detection. :-) It is interesting that this monkey face is recognized and the face in the same photo but with less of black margin is not.

You can even display Nikon RAW files (NEF) with this application, see this Windows Experience Team Blog entry and this one, too. You just have to download and install the Nikon RAW Codecs.

My D90 RAW files are imported correctly, displayed as thumbnail but not displayed in large view, The application sais that I might have too less memory to display it… don’t think so.